EveryCook

Cooking gets digital

We know, that cooking is an art. Selecting the ingredients, carefully washing, pealing
and cutting them before you put them into the right dish at the right time with the right heat.
Watching the food change his color, form and consistency, seasoning it to develop it's
flavors and serving it on beautiful plates is a pleasure.
For some, but not for all.Those who love cooking can spend hours at the stove and
relax while preparing delicious meals.
For others cooking is pure stress. What is the difference between orange and yellow
carrots? Did I forget something? Is the pan hot enough? Or too hot? How long after the
pasta do I start cooking the steak? Will it be healthy? Is it sustainable?
So many questionsappear if one starts to think about food. The answers are complicated
and ambiguous. They require research and analyzing.
Many have stopped thinkingabout food. They just believe what is written on the
package.
I can't cook is such an easy answer. And it is accepted in our society. Nobody is
ashamed of it.
This gives more and more control tomultinational corporations. Through precooked
food and shiny commercials they calm our conscience and stimulate our laziness.
The consequences are dramatic!The profit-focused approach of multinational
corporations have led to things like:
• Patented genetically modified seeds. Lawyers suing farmers for copyrights.
• Destruction of South-American jungle to make soya to feed European cows so they
make more milk. Although a cow as never born to eat proteins.
• Chickens that can't stand on their own feet due to the weight of their breasts. They
will never see soil, worms or even sunlight.
• Oran-Utangs losing their homes for palm oil
• Vegetables getting grown in the desert, wasting huge amounts of drinking water.
Conclusions:
• We must know more about our food
• We have to cook more ourselves
• So we will recover some control over what we eat

What is EveryCook?

Hardware
We build our machines with the resources that we can financially effort. The current hardware is
still in beta-phase.
The machine has been developed as a kit. Where possible, standard components were used. So
we can produce small quantities at relatively low costs.
The hardware is open source. Anyone can download the plans and build the machine by himself.
But whoever changes these plans or uses them to develop something new should share it with us.
The design has been uncompromisingly optimized for modifiability, robustness and repairability.
Aesthetics will come later.

Features
We tried to build a simple machine, which can anyways do many things.
Therefore we took advantage of synergies where possible:

If we have a heated pot, we dimension everything around it to be able to fry in it

If we have a motor to stir, we can also use it to cut

If we build a scale, we use 4 independent load cells. It simplifies mechanics and allows us

Software
The software from EveryCook is open source. It uses many proven tools and frameworks that are
also open source. The whole project is hosted on GitHub. Everyone interested can join and help
us.
We use:

Yii Framework for PHP code

jQuery for JavaScript

Arduino and Leaflabs IDE for microcontroller programming

Perl for the interface between the microcontroller and Linux

Linux for the embedded computer running a LAMP

Our database is developed under the cc-by-sa license. If you want to access it you can do that and
develop other smart cooking appliance. Who adds new records, shall share these with us.
Who wants to help us feeding the database with information is always welcome. The more
information about food and recipes is available, the better for everyone who uses EveryCook.
We see in EveryCook a great opportunity to promote direct sales of food from producers to
consumers. So if you know a farmer or food production place, please enter the food into the
database and link it with recipes and producers. Then we will have less unnecessary shipping and
get fresher food.
The nutritional value information has been provided by the USDA Nutrient Database. This is the
only freely available database although almost every country maintains a nutritional value
database. We will try to add more nutritional value data as soon as possible.